Many people suffer from some type of injury, disability, or impairment to their brain (hereinafter generally referred to as a mental disability). The term mental disability is intended to be a broad term encompassing such things as epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, depression, obsessive compulsive disorders, learning disabilities, dyslexia, seizure disorders, stroke victims, Alzheimer's Diseases, motor difficulties, emotionally behavioral disorders, and even low intelligence quotients (IQ), including mentally intellectually impaired disorder (“MIID”) and slow learners. While these mental disabilities all differ in their precise symptoms, many of these mental disabilities share common symptoms relating to language processing, be it expressive or receptive, related to written or spoken language processing as an impaired ability to retrieve and/or express, process and retain information in short or long term memory or to utilize working memory. For example, traumatic brain injury may result in a loss of flexibility in thinking and processing information or in aphasia, the loss of the facility of speech or of connecting words and ideas. While often times the speech organs and general intelligence remain unaffected, reading, writing, calculating, and other processing skills are affected. Other common symptoms include the inability to use or understand words, problems with comprehension or grammatical correctness when writing, reading or speaking, the inability to focus visual attention, defects in vision, short and or long-term memory loss, just to name a few. For dyslexia, symptoms include a disturbance of the ability to read, as well as difficulty in reading, spelling, writing, math, auditory processing, problems with organizational skills, and loss of memory.
For attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a perceived problem is the disruption of working memory. In “Effects of ADHD on Neural Correlates of Working Memory: A Positron Emission Tomography Study,” J. B. Schweitzer, J. M. Hoffman, L. Tune, S. T. Grafton, and C. D. Kilts of the Depts. of Psychiatry, Neurology, & Emory PET Center, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga. 30322 reported that researchers at Emory University discovered “less efficient use of the prefrontal cortex in patients than in matched controls. ADHD patients scored lower on numeric tasks.” “Persons with ADHD tend to integrate information in more visual and less auditory ways,” according to Julie Schweitzer, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. She also said that “the details of these types of findings will be of interest to . . . educators designing teaching tools for children and adults with ADHD.” In the study, Schweitzer took brain scans of six ADHD men and six control men while they performed an auditory arithmetic task. Schweitzer found efficient use of prefrontal cortex in control subjects and much less efficient use of that region in the ADHD subjects.
The problems and challenges associated with these mental disabilities can have severe consequences on a person's quality of life. Disruptions of working memory may explain the many difficulties individuals with ADHD encounter, from laborious reading to forgetting to finish multiple chores. “Results from the current study suggest that use of two subsidiary processes of working memory may be disrupted in ADHD: the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad process,” Schweitzer says. “Group differences may reflect a disruption in allocation of attention and use of a central executive system by subjects with ADHD, which in turn alters the use and efficiency of the subsidiary process of working memory.” A syndrome of learning and behavioral problems that is not caused by any serious underlying physical or mental disorder and is characterized by difficulty in sustaining attention by impulsive behavior, such as speaking out of turn or excessive activity is referred to a minimal brain dysfunction (Merriam Webster's Medical Dictionary).
For children, the mental disability may interfere with that child's ability to function and behave in school. Children may suffer academically in that they are unable to keep up with their belongings and homework assignments, and are generally more disorganized than other students of their same age and/or grade. Their grades may suffer which often instills a low self-esteem and high level of frustration. The difficulty in school may become so severe that too many of these children will flunk out of school, simply drop out of school, or change classification under public school guidelines to emotionally behaviorally disordered.
The problems facing children, as well as people of all ages, with mental disabilities extend beyond just classroom. Many of these people have difficulty interacting with other people and a low level of social development. Neurological disorders often times impede language and derail social and emotional development. For example, day dreaming, fantasizing, experiencing delusions, and hallucinations, accompanied by marked withdrawal from reality is common. People may have difficulty with daily activities, such as being on time for work or appointments, remembering to take medicines, completing job related assignments, returning telephone calls, timely bill paying, maintaining an orderly and clean house, and personal hygiene. In fact, the social problems for some may be so severe as to cause them to enter juvenile systems or even prison.
Systems and methods have been developed to assist with learning disabilities. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,695,257 to Vawter, 5,336,093 to Cox, 5,009,603 to Fong et al., 5,135,398 to Thornton et al., 5,256,067 to Gildea et al., and 5,316,485 to Hirose are examples of such systems, all of which are incorporated herein by reference. These systems and methods are intended to assist in teaching reading, writing, and mathematics. A typical approach with these types of systems and methods is to incorporate conventional classroom techniques into a game or a computer program. These conventional teaching methods have already been proven to be ineffective in reaching these students whereby implementing these methods into a computer program would have a low chance of success.
A need therefore exists for improved methods and systems for assisting people with mental disabilities, in the areas of cognitive processing that appear to be hindering them from meeting the mental, emotional, behavioral, and academic demands of and especially helping children with the demands placed upon them through school and elsewhere.